Quotes from Daniel Okrent

But I think it's undeniable that the Times is a liberal paper.

alcohol consumption fell sharply at the beginning of Prohibition, to approximately 30 percent of its pre-Prohibition level," and by the time of Repeal had risen "to about 60–70 percent of its pre-Prohibition level.

With that single previous exception, the original Constitution and its first seventeen amendments limited the activities of government, not of citizens. Now there were two exceptions: you couldn't own slaves, and you couldn't buy alcohol.

When I sell liquor, it's bootlegging," either Capone or one of his amanuenses said. "When my patrons serve it on a silver tray on Lake Shore Drive, it's hospitality." It was a recurrent theme, this shrugging disavowal of evil intent: "Ninety percent of the people of Cook County drink and gamble," he said at another time, "and my offense has been to furnish them with those amusements.

San Francisco in 1890 might have seemed barely more saloon-sodden than that, reporting one for every 96 residents—but this was a measure only of the city's 3,000 licensed establishments, while less restrictive estimates threw in an additional 2,000 unlicensed places.

With that single previous exception, the original Constitution and its first seventeen amendments limited the activities of government, not of citizens. Now there were two exceptions: you couldn't

There wasn't a single teetotaler "among the world's really great men," Stoll wrote; on the contrary, he said, the roster of wine-loving giants ran from Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar to Columbus, Dickens, Lincoln, and Bismarck, not to mention Verdi, Wagner, and Admiral Dewey.

But Taft also believed that the citizen who obeys only laws that he endorses "is willing to govern, but not be governed"—willing, in other words, to destroy the rule of law.

He did not consider it "the function of law to jack up the moral tone of any community." That, he said, was "the function of the home and the church.

The iron miners who belonged to the Italian Club in the town of Virginia, Minnesota, took pains to procure more suitable grapes, dispatching a grocer named Cesare Mondavi to the San Joaquin Valley late each summer to acquire their supply. Inspired to get into the grape business himself, Mondavi soon moved his family to California, where his precocious son Robert would make his own name in the winemaking world.

Ten thousand grateful people jammed Sunday's enormous tabernacle to hear him announce the death of liquor and reveal the advent of an earthly paradise. "The reign of tears is over," Sunday proclaimed. "The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent.

Gough had delivered more than ten thousand speeches to audiences estimated at more than nine million people. Among his listeners was a San Francisco surveyor who named one of the city's main thoroughfares in his honor—out of either a sense of gratitude or, possibly, irony.

wouldn't have to suffer the confiscation of hip flasks en route to San Francisco. That was because they didn't have to take any along. San Francisco had officially declared its distaste for Prohibition even before it had started. Back in 1919, the city's considerate board of supervisors, mindful of the hardship about to be visited upon its citizens, had unanimously repealed the city ordinance banning unlicensed saloons.

3 East 84th still looks both fitting and fresh. It also looks familiar: the limestone

Junior was fundamentally free of anti-Semitism, and maintained throughout his life social, professional, and philanthropic bonds with a number of Jews. But

political identity that Bertram Wolfe characterized as "an undigested mixture of Spanish anarchism, Russian terrorism, Soviet Marxism-Leninism [and] Mexican agrarianism.

a man on a scaffold throwing a tree at another man on another scaffold.

Most of all, though, he was certain. Doubt did not cloud his days, nor did it disturb his dreams.

and in December 1931 parts of New York looked as if God had gotten bored with the Creation business in the middle of the sixth day and simply walked off the job. Work

Time and Fortune, a columnist wrote, "We wonder if there will ever be any building again." Sixty-four percent of the city's construction workers were unemployed.

his association with the Rockefellers had inflated his already healthy sense of self to a point of bloated grandiosity, and

Rockefeller properties: his own house; the annex next door at number 12 (acquired in part to hang the Unicorn Tapestries, which just didn't seem to fit in the nine stories of number 10); his father's house, the old Huntington mansion, at number 4; the family gardens at numbers 6 and 8; and, backing onto those, numbers 5 and 7 West 53rd Street, the double mansion that was the winter home of Junior's sister, Alma Rockefeller Prentice.

not most, of the high-steel workers were Caughnawaga Mohawks from upstate New York.

In 1850 Americans drank 36 million gallons of the stuff; by 1890 annual consumption had exploded to 855 million gallons. During that four-decade span, while the population tripled, that population's capacity for beer had increased twenty-four-fold.